We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down
to Kau, where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel.
Next day we bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad
mountain-terraces, toward the great volcano of Kilauea
(Ke-low-way-ah). We made nearly a two days’ journey of it, but
that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset on the second day,
we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea
level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes of
lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of
its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near
presence of the volcano—signs in the nature of ragged fissures
that discharged jets of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from
the molten ocean down in the bowels of the mountain.
Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since,
but it was a mere toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle, compared
to this. Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet
high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep,
and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as
that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile.—But here was a vast,
perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some
places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles
in circumference! Here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the
armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.
Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from
where we stood, was a small look-out house—say three miles away.
It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the
great depth of the basin—it looked like a tiny martin-box
clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. After some little time
spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the
hotel.
By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the
lookout-house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was
thoroughly dark and then started to the crater. The first glance
in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a
heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated by
the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles
wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night
and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of
distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against
over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked
like.
A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the
air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every
one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which
was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between. It
glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy
height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its
like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on
their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a
path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of fire.” And I was
sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic
“pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a
revelation.
Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our
elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide
crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires
beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight
experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the
company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw.
In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron,
every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into
dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the
infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come
up on a furlough.
I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was
tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us
and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was
magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung
down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all
that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater
seem countless leagues removed—made them seem like the
camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the
imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of
a continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness
were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and
desert—and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on,
and on!—to the fires and far beyond! You could not compass
it—it was the idea of eternity made tangible—and the longest
end of it made visible to the naked eye!
The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was
as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile
square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand
branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It
looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts
done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it—imagine a
coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-work of angry
fire!
Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter,
broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—the color
a dazzling white just tinged with yellow—was boiling and surging
furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright
torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept
a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in
huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp
worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest
jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they
mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every
conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating
ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from
the holes to some distance without dividing—and through the
opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills
and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but
soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with
alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of
the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams
like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing
under the superincumbent crust broke through—split a dazzling
streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden
flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava
parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when
a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in
the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the “thaw”
maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and
became black and level again. During a “thaw,” every dismembered
cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly
shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming
yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward
their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale
carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a
moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams
preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles,
and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one
sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped
anchor—provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.
Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about
looked very beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered,
and discharged sprays of stringy red fire—of about the
consistency of mush, for instance—from ten to fifteen feet into
the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks—a quaint
and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snow-flakes!
We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all
twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout
an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was
covered, though it was not strictly “square”), and it was with a
feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years
had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid
display—since any visitor had seen anything more than the now
snubbed and insignificant “North” and “South” lakes in action. We
had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the “Record
Book” at the Volcano House, and were posted.
I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away
off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a
web-work of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked
very little more respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it
was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide,
but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily
appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from
us.
I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is
not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes
three distinct sounds—a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or
puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes
it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a
river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the
hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her
escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels.
The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a
sinner.
We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked
condition, because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping
up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our
Hotel.
